Sarah Williams Goldhagen dismisses as a myth the view that Kahn was “[a] latter-day neo-Platonist… [who] believed it was the architect’s job to ‘discover’ ideal forms and then re-embody these archetypes in a new architectural language.” Goldhagen makes a valuable contribution to Kahn scholarship, but she trivialises Kahn’s approach to form generation, which bares less resemblance to the preoccupations of the Neoplatonists than it does to Plato’s theory of Forms. The paper examines claims by various scholars including Jencks, Norberg- Schulz, Burton, Scully, Brownlee, De Long, Auer, Gast, and Danto that Plato’s philosophy may be a source of Kahn’s theory. The paper attempts to explain why Kahn does not acknowledge Plato’s influence, by demonstrating, through archival evidence and interviews, that Kahn obscures the influence of numerous other figures and tries instead to present an ex nihilo design philosophy. Yet, despite this tendency, Kahn does, on one occasion in March 1960, state that an architect must “start right at the beginning, as though he were Socrates,” when contemplating ideal “forms.” This solitary reference by Kahn to Plato’s mentor has been discovered by the present author in The Kahn Collection in Philadelphia. It suggests that Platonism is indeed a source of Kahn’s “form and design” theory. It is true that Kahn was a “this worldly” practitioner of architecture, but the alchemic aspects of his metaphysics, for which he is remembered, remain a legitimate subject for continuing scholarship.

Relation

XIXth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand. Additions to Architectural History: XIXth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand, Brisbane, Australia, 4-7 October 2002 (Brisbane, Qld. 4-7 October, 2002)